Introduction

This chapter reflects upon value and ethical issues raised by narrative inquiry within criminological research, particularly in its use with vulnerable and marginalised populations, in this case, (ex-)offenders. Drawing upon experiences of undertaking two desistance-focused research projects, we explore the contours of debates around taking ‘sides’, sympathy, bias and values in narrative inquiry in this area, as well as the ethical issues relating to consent, ownership and interpretive authority raised by its use.

The field of narrative inquiry is complex and diverse. Researchers employ a number of different approaches, strategies and methods, which reflect subtle differences in ontological and epistemological understandings and assumptions about what is being studied (Clandinin, 2007). Notwithstanding, narrative inquiry is based on a number of central propositions: that people ascribe sense and meaning to their experiences and to their lives by grasping them as stories or narratives; that identity or the self is essentially a storied concept; and that people's stories therefore offer insights about their subjective experiences of the world and identities. Common threads in narrative inquiry thus include an interest in people's lived experiences, in the self and representations of the self, and change over time, as well as a desire to empower research participants to contribute to the most salient themes in the area of research (Elliot, 2005).

The fundamental ontological and epistemological differences between traditional ‘scientific’ research and narrative inquiry are summarised by Bruner (1986). What he terms the ‘logical scientific’ mode of research centres on the epistemological question of how to know the ‘truth’ and the search for a universal truth condition, whereas narrative inquiry looks for particular conditions and centres on the broader question of the meaning of experience. His summary highlights how traditional notions of objectivity, validity and supposed truth in research are arguably reframed in narrative inquiry. Such inquiry often explicitly attempts to engage with the researched, to reconstitute the research relationship and to view people's stories not as an accurate representation of the ‘truth’ of what really happened or as works of fiction, but as accounts of participants’ truth in the sense of how they interpret and attach meaning to their experiences and how they construct and reconstruct their identity. As highlighted by Somers (1994), narrative, with its association with the humanities and literary studies, has long been deemed the epistemological ‘other’ in the social sciences.